Teasdale was nothing less than a miracle worker… By her very presence, she gave Ugandans so much hope. – Dr. Elizabeth Hillman, Canadian pediatrician
On a hot and steamy morning in August 1996 a small Cessna airplane landed on the airstrip of Gulu airport in northern Uganda. The door opened, and Piero Corti, an Italian doctor, stepped down onto the sizzling tarmac. Following close behind him was the coffin of his Canadian-born wife, Dr. Lucille Teasdale.
The moment ended an emotional journey for Corti, one he had dreaded ever since he first received news of Lucille’s illness just over eleven years before. Since then, the two had lived through many highs and lows, and even as Lucille grew slowly weaker, they had both prayed for more time together. But it was not to be. After a heroic struggle that amazed her family and friends, Lucille finally lost the battle. Her death in Italy ended a remarkable and loving partnership that spanned thirty-five years and three continents.
On this blistering day, Corti was bringing his wife’s body back to the country they had both called home for more than three decades. From the Gulu airport, a van carried the coffin across the barren plains of Uganda’s northern region to the village of Lacor [pronounced La-chore]. After a bumpy six-kilometre journey, they arrived at a grove of palm trees. Branches of scarlet bougainvillea tumbled over a high stone wall, and a white sign with a large red cross marked the entrance to Lacor Hospital.
The van passed through the black steel gates and entered the compound. In front of them lay the hospital that was Piero and Lucille’s lifelong labour of love. In 1961, when they first arrived here, they had found a tiny forty-bed dispensary run by a handful of Italian nuns. By 1996, they had managed to transform it “by our wits and our faith” into the medical showpiece of Uganda, a hospital with 450 beds and a staff of 400, all of them African.
Piero Corti had the coffin placed in the tiny hospital chapel. The following day, mourners began to arrive from all over the region. Some travelled by bus or bicycle but most came on foot. They lined up patiently in the hospital courtyard, then filed slowly through the chapel to pay their final respects to the person they called “Dr. Lucille,” their surgeon and friend, who had cared for so many of them.
Over the years, Lucille Teasdale had given much to the people of her adopted country. She had restored the health of those she could. To those she could not cure, like the thousands who suffered from AIDS, she offered sympathy and comfort. Lucille was only too aware of the ravages of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). She was one of its victims.
A religious ceremony was held in the Cathedral in nearby Gulu, and local dignitaries came to pay homage and to offer prayers and tributes. Then the body was returned to the hospital compound for burial. Lucille had chosen the exact spot where she wished to be buried: she wanted to lie within sight of the hospital “so I can keep an eye on things.” She also wished to be close to the tiny chapel where she and Piero had been married thirty-five years earlier.
Dr. Matthew Lukwiya, the hospital’s senior medical advisor, stood solemnly beside the coffin. Six other Ugandan doctors, all wearing their white medical coats, lined up beside him. They were among the hundreds of Africans who had been trained by Lucille. Together, they lifted the coffin and slowly lowered it into the ground next to a flowering frangipani tree.
Piero Corti stepped slowly forward and placed a wreath of red roses on his wife’s grave. A young African woman placed another wreath with a message tacked to it that read: “From a representative of the patients.” She had been the last person to be treated by Dr. Lucille.
As a final tribute, each person stepped forward and tossed a flower into the grave before it was covered with earth.
Then the local Acholi people offered their final farewell. They did so in the form of their traditional funeral dance, one normally reserved for a tribal chief.
A dozen dancers moved forward. They carried spears and shields and wore headdresses of ostrich plumes and garments made of leopard skins. The dancers formed a circle around a band of drummers. The lead drummer signalled the start of the ceremony with a loud drum roll. Then a young man launched into a frenetic dance to the clatter of jingling hand-bells. The drumbeat continued.
A group of women shuffled into the circle in single file. They moved slowly and rhythmically, their bodies pumping to the beat of the drums. They sang and ululated in shrill piercing wails. One carried a framed portrait of Lucille, while the rest waved palm branches. Many dabbed tears from their eyes. The throbbing drumbeat rolled on.
Lucille Teasdale had touched the lives of many people. She may have left them, but clearly she would not soon be forgotten.
Everyone tried to discourage me from choosing surgery… They told me it was clearly a mans world and that no mother would ever put her child’s life in the hands of a woman surgeon. – Lucille Teasdale, 1956
Lucille Teasdale was born on 30 January 1929, the fourth in a family of five girls and two boys. They lived in Guybourg, a working-class neighbourhood in the east end of Montreal, where Lucille’s father, René, a butcher, owned and ran the first grocery store in the area. Actively involved in the community and in his Catholic church, he left Lucille’s mother, Juliette, with the job of raising their seven children.
Piero Corti, a young Italian doctor, comes to Montreal to study pediatrics.
Lucille obtains her medical diploma cum laude at the université de Montréal in 1955
Lucille preferred skating and playing hockey on a nearby rink to helping at home with household chores. Having such a boisterous tomboy for a daughter annoyed Juliette, who was obsessed with neatness and cleanliness and thought that all young girls should be obedient and feminine.
Lucille’s mother was a fragile woman who did her best to bring up her children according to her values. For most of her life, however, Juliette was given to long periods of depression. Lucille often noticed that her mother rarely smiled and always looked unhappy, but she was too young to understand why. Then one day, when Lucille returned from school, she overheard her mother confiding in a friend about her sadness. She had been so happy with her first three children, who were all girls, Juliette explained to her friend. But she desperately wanted a boy. When she was pregnant again, she prayed for a boy, but to her great disappointment, her fourth child was another girl. Lucille winced as she quickly realized she was that girl and the cause of her mothers unhappiness. She was devastated. From then on, she felt rejected by her mother, and the feeling haunted her for years.
Unlike her family and friends, Lucille loved school and worked hard at her studies. “None of them ever thought of studying,” she recalled years later. “They all wanted to leave school as soon as possible. The boys wanted to work in a factory and the girls wanted to work in Macdonald’s Tobacco.”
Lucille
